Historian @hebrewu. @TheWilsonCenter fellow, 2022- 23. _Oil Wars_ coming out with @yalebooks this October. More here: bit.ly/2OgaOaD
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Guy Laron retweeted
Was Yahya Sinwar, before October '23, behaving like Anwar Sadat before October '73? During the weekend, a new story by @ronenbergman @ynet added more details about the Hamas deception plan. And it helps explain how Sinwar prepared both diplomatic and military options and why
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Guy Laron retweeted
Fascinating thread detailing Israel-Hamas back channel negotiations prior to Oct 7. Confirms that proximate cause was Saudi normalization, but wasn’t the only enabling factor.
Was Yahya Sinwar, before October '23, behaving like Anwar Sadat before October '73? During the weekend, a new story by @ronenbergman @ynet added more details about the Hamas deception plan. And it helps explain how Sinwar prepared both diplomatic and military options and why
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Until October 2023, the commemoration of 6 October in Israel was a big event in national media, and much space was devoted to it, even 50 years later. But ever since October 2023, the events of that bloody day have completely overshadowed the Yom Kippur war.
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time as if it was about to be concluded successfully. Sinwar did not demand an end to the normalization process or the derailment of IMEC. He demanded the economic concessions promised to him. Netanyahu did not listen, and Sinwar launched the 7th of October attack.
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September and one time in mid-September, to make sure that the emissary would deliver the threat to the Israelis, each time repeating the promise to cause an earthquake. Interestingly, Sinwar did not say anything about the Israeli-Saudi normalization process that seemed at the
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for them a huge surprise... an earthquake." Here the Bergman theory unravels, in my opinion. If Sinwar negotiated with Bibi only to lull him, why would he warn Bibi and give him a heads-up? Moreover, Sinwar did not warn Bibi once. He warned him twice: one time in early
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reason that made the 7 October attack urgent.
Nevertheless, Sinwar decided to give Bibi one last shot. In early September, Sinwar summoned a trusted emissary to deliver a warning to the Israelis: "Tell them that if they don't get ahead [with the negotiations] I'm preparing
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at the margins of a new regional arrangement.
We know for a fact - through Hamas documents captured by Israel in Gaza - that the normalization deal with Saudi Arabia was the trigger for the Hamas decision to attack. Not the only reason, but definitely the wsj.com/world/middle-east/ha…
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agreement.
Sinwar must have felt duped. He probably thought that Bibi had a deception plan. That while Bibi was making promises for economic concessions, he was negotiating with the Saudis and the Americans on a peace agreement that would ignore the Palestinians and leave them
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September 2023 with the Biden announcement on the IMEC initiative, which would link India to Europe through a U.S. sanctioned silk road. To advance the initiative, and build the infrastructure connecting the UAE to Israel, Jerusalem and Riyadh were to sign a "normalization
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where the parties could reach a deal and commit to an agreement.
Sinwar was waiting for Bibi to approve these understandings in the cabinet. But Bibi never did. He dragged his feet. Sinwar was told that Bibi was too busy dealing with the "judicial reform." Then came early
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military supriority. Both in 1973 and in 2023, the Israeli prime minister feared that deep concessions to the enemy would destabilize his coalition.
According to the Eldar story @Haaretz by late August 2023, the negotiations in the secret Bibi-Sinwar channel reached the point
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he was asking for, he, Sinwar, had a credible military option. As with Sadat in 1973, Sinwar's threat to use force if negotiations became deadlocked, didn't sway the government in Jerusalem. Both in 1973 and 2023, the Israeli prime minister was acting from a false sense of
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Sadat made two secret attempts in the first half of 1973 to get negotiations with Israel going. When this did not work out, Sadat chose war.
Furthermore, the mid-2023 Hamas noisy drills could have been Sinwar's way to signal to Bibi that if he didn't get the economic concessions
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was preparing the military and the diplomatic option at the very same time, hoping that a diplomatic solution would negate the need to use military measures. Ahead of the Yom Kippur war Sadat initiated peace feelers to Israel through the then NSC advisor to Nixon, Henry Kissinger
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them and see them as a part of a new routine.
For Bergman, the mid-2023 Hamas drills are part of the sophisticated deception plan that was meant to catch the IDF unaware. But a different interpretation is possible: that Sinwar was behaving "like in 1973" in the sense that he
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comparison to 1973 becomes explicit in the Bergman story. At this point, one of the anonymous intelligence officers who was interviewed for the piece says that what Hamas did was similar to what the Egyptian army did in 1973: to conduct so many drills to make the enemy belittle
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But Sinwar could not have known that Bibi was committed to the negotiations and that they would end in a settlement. So, at the very same time that Sinwar was negotiating with Bibi secretly, the Hamas conducted large scale visible military drills in May and June 2023. Here the
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energy to the strip, removal of the Israeli-enforced economic blockade, direct access for the Gaza Palestinians to the Sharm el-Sheikh airport, free trade zones on Gaza's borders with Israel and Egypt. These measures could dramatically improve the economic situation in Gaza.
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join the war once Hamas started it.
However, according to @shlomieldar @Haaretz, exactly at the same time Sinwar's and Bibi's trusted emissaries began a series of talks on far-reaching economic benefits for the strip, including development of the Gaza Marine gas field to supply
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